10 meters is a promise, not a guarantee
Every Bluetooth device has something in the specs like "range up to 10 meters." That’s true – outdoors, in a field, with no obstacles, with even the wind from the right direction. In practice, it’s another story.
Bluetooth is a radio signal. It behaves like any radio signal: it travels well through air, but poorly through walls, floors, and human bodies. A concrete wall is roughly to Bluetooth what the Berlin Wall was to East Germans. A timber-framed partition wall still lets the signal through reasonably well. A reinforced-concrete apartment building doesn’t.
Why does the connection cut out at home?
A typical situation: headphones on, phone on the kitchen table, you walk into the living room. The distance is maybe five meters. Yet the music cuts out.
There are a few reasons:
- Walls and doors – Every wall weakens the signal. Two walls and the range easily drops by half.
- Other devices – Bluetooth operates on the 2.4 GHz frequency. On the same frequency run the WiFi router, the microwave oven, the neighbor’s WiFi, and probably a couple of dozen other devices. There’s plenty of congestion.
- Water and people – The human body is mostly water. Water attenuates radio signals effectively. If your phone is in your back pocket and you’re standing between the headphones and the phone – well, you’re the obstacle.
- Old Bluetooth versions – Older devices (Bluetooth 4.0 or below) have weaker range and are more prone to interference.
How do you get the best range?
A few practical tips:
- Keep the phone in the same room. The simplest solution. It doesn’t need to be in your pocket; being in the same space is enough.
- Reduce obstacles. An open door between two rooms helps a surprising amount.
- Keep the phone out of your pocket. On a table or a shelf, the signal travels more freely than in the jeans pocket behind your buttocks.
- Check the Bluetooth version. Valco devices currently use Bluetooth 5.x, which is significantly more stable than older versions. If you pair with an old phone, the bottleneck may be the phone.
What if the range is really poor?
If the connection starts dropping already a couple of meters away in the same room without obstacles, there might be a real fault rather than a law of physics. Try these first:
- Restart the headphones and the phone.
- Remove the headphones’ pairing from the phone and pair again.
- Check that the headphones aren’t connected to another device at the same time – Bluetooth tries to serve everyone and ends up serving no one well.
If nothing helps, send us a message at info@valco.fi. Describe the problem, and we’ll figure out whether it’s a fault or physics. Unfortunately, we can’t fix physics – maybe once the Death Star is finished.
